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Three higher ed IT leaders weigh in on what it means to be 'chief information officer' now and in the future.

The Road Ahead

By Mary Grush

01/01/10

THE ROLE OF THE CIO IN HIGHER EDUCATION has expanded over time as technology has worked its way into our daily
lives, altering forever the way we work and learn, and becoming ubiquitous
on our campuses. IT is now critical to the business of education,
and the CIO has stretched his or her influence to span key operational
areas and diverse programs, often providing input to top institutional
leadership and sometimes to the comprehensive strategic plan. Does
that mean CIOship in higher education is a booming business? We got
some perspectives from three experienced higher education professionals
who have been tracking the higher ed CIO for years:

Bruce Maas, CIO at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
reflects on implications stemming from what he considers to be the
biggest change factor for CIOs today: the economy. Maas presents
widely at national conferences on issues relating to the role of the
CIO, where he argues the permanence and impact of these changes.

In response, Mely Tynan, recently retired CIO from Tufts University (MA), considers which leadership areas the CIO should focus on.
Now a consultant and leadership coach, Tynan provides organizational-
and technology-leadership consulting and seminars, and she
conducts strategic planning and IT organizational reviews for university
leadership.

We close with Wayne Brown, vice president for information technology
at Excelsior College (NY), who brings data from his 2009
Higher Education Technology Leadership Study that could call into
question the very existence of the CIO role in higher education.

Bruce Maas CIO, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The current economic conditions are likely to constrain us for
quite some time. The way we went about doing business in the
past has changed, and I believe it will be changed permanently,
moving out into the future. With constrained resources, you
have to be extremely careful about how every dollar is spent.
And it's not that any university has not been frugal or attentive
to that, but there's a new level that's in place, of paying attention
to the dollars. It's no longer possible to get by while having
some inefficiencies.

What is, right now, the biggest factor influencing change in the higher ed CIO role?

One of the areas I am looking at regarding the role of the
CIO is the relationship with the chief business officer. While
that has always been important, at this point it becomes
almost acute. The CBO and the CIO have many, many common
intersection points. One example is budgeting methodologies.
When you move forward, for example, with projects
that are considered to be of strategic importance, it is
absolutely essential that those projects be fully costed with
the total cost of ownership over time. Exit strategies, too, are
always difficult because you have stakeholders who are
reliant on technology. We are in a new position now where it's
very important to have agreement on how you form your business
cases and how you cost things out.

"The CIO's
relationship with the chief business officer has always been important, but at this point it becomes almost acute.”

Another thing with the chief business officer is that many
of the university's business processes really do run through
the CFO or CBO. As CIOs we're in a natural position to work
as fully collaborative partners with those executives, because
IT has a well-established methodology of developing requirements
that has worked over many years. While there are
aspects of [those requirements] which formerly have been
thought of as only applying to IT, I think the concept of
requirements works well broadly. On our campus we've used
the IIBA-- International Institute of Business Analysts-- body of knowledge as part of that methodology,
and doing that has yielded a remarkable level of agreement.
This is a natural place for the CIO to develop into a slightly
different role than we may have had in the past.

Another important area relates to the issue of where
technologists reside organizationally and how they work
together, as well as how they work with their business
counterparts. One of our big challenges in higher ed is
that the staff in central IT and staff in distributed areas
don't always have the same view of the world. Often we
see some overlap that occurs. In part there may be role
ambiguity, or there may be a lack of clarity about who
should be doing what, under what circumstances, and
so on. The role of the CIO needs to include helping to
break down those barriers.

On my campus, the model that we use to talk about
this is called service layers. As you move through the different
services-- for example, desktop support-- you'll
find more of those functions are actually occurring closer
to the faculty member, so they are more "edge”: That
is, they are tailored for particular needs in disciplines and
areas. All of that is worth talking about, because the
same practices should not apply to every unit on campus.

I believe the CIO is the person who should be driving
that kind of a discussion, because the role of CIO is
not just to supervise or direct the central division of
information technology, but to represent the broader
needs of the campus community. The CIO needs to
establish and create an environment of trust where you
can have those discussions in a productive, collegial,
and meaningful way.

Amelia (Mely) Tynan, Consultant and
Retired Tufts University CIO

The concept that comes to me as a big takeaway for leadership
is context. It's very important to understand the
current context in which you are leading. As we know,
colleges and universities are complex enterprises with
tremendously distributed authority, and the structure is
pretty diverse. Constituencies are diverse; you have a lot
of people to satisfy. So it is important to understand the
context for planning, decision-making, and resource allocation
at your own institution. We are in tough budget
times right now but this can vary across campuses, so for
you it could be transparent or very opaque. Cost-cutting
is a focus for almost everyone right now, but the usual
issues and frictions of central versus decentralized organizations
continue to be important and are not likely to
disappear.

What aspects of leadership should CIOs focus on in a changing environment?

The other thing that one has to be sensitive to as a CIO
is understanding your local politics. You must able to navigate
that-- and local politics can change suddenly, by the
way. Change could be triggered by a directive from the
chair of the board, or the departure of a senior administrator,
or a crisis, or-- right now-- the economy, or a new
technology for that matter. A smart CIO will sense and
respond to these changing dynamics, and be flexible
enough to ensure that alignment is always there.

"I'm often asked: 'What is your
vision of IT?' But there is no such thing as a standalone IT vision. It must be hitched to a larger picture and it must yield benefits to the broader institution.”

With changing scenarios in IT-- and the pervasiveness
of technology is everywhere, it's not just in the IT shop--
we cannot assume constancy of support for our IT initiatives,
so flexibility is very important. Seeking feedback
often and throughout the institution is critical.

Maybe related to that, we sometimes still underrate or
overlook the importance of relationships. I know we always
say that, but to us it should mean taking a lot of actions:
reaching out, having more energy to create, nurture, and
manage relationships. I know for me, visiting deans and departments
is very important. Even if they're not necessarily interested
in technology, a lot of times it's about understanding
where they are coming from, listening, learning, engaging them
in all kinds of conversations, because you ultimately are seeking
opportunities for technology to be of benefit to them.

A question I'm often asked is, "What is your vision of IT?”
In many ways there is no such thing as a standalone IT vision,
because it must be hitched to a larger picture and it must yield
benefits to the broader institution. It is important to understand
that the idea or the real power of vision is unleashed only when
a community has a shared sense of direction.

If you think about it, everything that is happening-- and it's
not just true for campuses, but also in business organizations--
everything is touched now by technology. So there are very
few pure central IT projects or pure IT projects. It is both an
opportunity and a complex management gray area because we
are always managing intersections-- it's not just the simpler IT
of the past where you were in the central computer center and
you defined, developed, and delivered services. Now, it's really
using the nature of new technologies and identifying the
opportunities in the collaborative context of removing barriers. IT is a very good vehicle for removing barriers and creating
opportunities in teaching and learning, and in operations.

In terms of understanding the changing CIO role, it's simple:
It means that whereas you once were a sole provider, you are
now working with many co-providers. This really is the thrust
of the need for partnership. CIOs and other service providers on
campus have to connect our customers' or stakeholders' selfinterest
to our efforts. In other words, ask, in what way does this
new visualization lab or the new streaming media advance your
success as a school or as a department? Think of building more
of that type of link to the purposes of the user, in order to serve
something bigger than the IT purpose.

Wayne Brown, Vice President for Information
Technology, Excelsior College

Forty-five percent of CIOs are going to retire in the next 10
years from higher education. That's been a pretty consistent
number across versions of the research that I've done [at the
Center for Higher Education Chief Information Officer Studies
(CHECS)]. That got me thinking about who
the replacements are. I think the majority of them will come
from that next layer down in the organizational chart. My concern
prior to the [2009 CHECS] survey-- and something that I
heard from other CIOs-- was that we didn't think people in that
group wanted the job. The survey data reveals, fortunately, that
isn't the case. If you continue looking 10 years out, 59 percent
of the [second-tier] people I surveyed are interested in the CIO
job. And there are more of them than there are CIOs-- there are
probably at least two people on that level at an institution of
any size, and in some cases at some of the larger institutions
there are 13 or 14 of them.

Who is the next-generation CIO and how will the job change in the future?

The disturbing result of the
survey was, however, when I
asked who's helping these
potential CIOs get ready for a
CIO role, the number one
answer was no one. Thirtyeight
percent of the people who
said they wanted the job had no
one helping them prepare. So
mentorship is becoming very important. What do we need a
CIO to know? What experiences should they have had? What
education should they have had?

"The foundational things that
we're best at, the things that are considered most important by us and by the institutional management, can be easily outsourced. That's a bad recipe for the long-term viability of the CIO.”

If you ask 10 CIOs the career path they took to get to the
job, you'll probably get 10 different answers. So when you
think about the people in the next layer down, and what they
are doing or what they think they need to do to get ready
to become a CIO, it's a rather cloudy career path. Part of
what CIOs need to do is reach down and help people in
that next layer, whether it's people who work for them or
people from another institution. We have to mentor and
provide opportunities for those people in the next layer
down to get ready to become a CIO, if that's what they
want to do.

But the nature of the CIO job itself is in question for the
future. In the CIO research that I do, I ask a variety of
questions that put the CIO into different roles. They cover
all the different jobs that the CIO does, from making sure
that there's a responsive help desk and computers on desks, to being a partner in strategy. And everything in
between. Consistently across versions of the study, when I ask
the CIO, the university management, and the CIO's peers and
supervisors-- in what role is the CIO most effective?-- they
say that the most effective roles are foundational rather than
strategic: putting PCs on desks, answering help desk phones,
and those kinds of things.

Yet the roles that I think are more important, and that I
believe most CIOs would rather do, such as being involved in
the strategy of the institution, evangelizing for technology, and
making sure that the management team is educated on the possibilities
of technology-- those strategic roles consistently are
viewed as the least important and the place where the CIOs are
least effective, according to themselves and according to the
management team.

This sets us up for a diminished CIO job, given the possibility
that foundational roles can be outsourced. There are
companies that will provide help desks, and I know there are
a number of institutions that outsource the help desk. That's
a dangerous place for us to be, where the thing that we're the
best at, and the thing that's considered the most important by
us and by the institutional management team, can be easily
outsourced. That's a bad recipe for the long-term viability
of the CIO.

I think there are a couple of different scenarios for the
future. One is that we do outsource those foundational roles,
and CIOs ascend to the strategy level. That's possible if you're
on that level already and you have strategic roles. But if you're
focused on foundational things, if you're not a member of the
management team, and you're not reporting to the CEO-- then
maybe you just get outsourced. And we don't need a CIO just
to manage contracts because there's a purchasing department
to do that. I'm not saying this is something that would happen
tomorrow, but that's definitely one possibility, especially
when you consider that only 34 percent of CIOs report to the
CEO, and only 56 percent are members of the management
team. So if you're not there now and you don't have that visibility,
if you're not seen as somebody who should be at the
table for strategy, and then those foundational things lead you
to outsourcing-- that's one scary possible future.

Strategic conversations regarding IT are going to take place
whether there's a CIO at the table or not. Are the [conversations]
going to be well-informed? They are awfully expensive
and important to any institution to take place without somebody
who understands [technology] at the table. But those
conversations are taking place, and they are taking place
without us. These things concern me about the future of
the profession.